by Norman Green
“Thanks,” I told him, “but I don’t think so. Not unless you know something about the tongs.”
He gave me a look. “Queens or Manhattan?”
“You’re kidding me.”
He sighed. “If you work in the pharmaceutical trades and you survive long enough to get up off the street, you learn the players after a while. Some of the biker clubs will transport product on occasion. So, yeah, I heard about the tongs, but it ain’t like I met any of those guys.”
“Oh. But it’s true, then. I was told there are two tongs in New York.”
“Two majors,” he said. “Green Pang and Mott Street. Although, from what I hear, Mott Street ain’t what it used to be. Plus, you got the dudes out in Jersey, and there might be some upstarts. From time to time some of the young turks will test the old men, just to see if they’re still strong enough.”
“What’s wrong with the Mott Street crew?”
“Demographics, babe. The city is changing. You seen all them palefaces we had in here tonight, last time you was here you was the only white boy for miles. Those Mott Street mothers are getting squeezed because Chinatown ain’t strictly Chinese like the way it used to be. Their business model don’t work like it used to because the people they depended on are getting pushed out of Manhattan by the lawyers and stockbrokers. I mean, I don’t wanna call you no names, Saul, but you know what these loser gang fuckwits are all about. If they can’t make that easy money, they start to get restive. Start killing each other and whatnot, fighting over what’s left.”
“Interesting.” But I didn’t see how the problems of the Mott Street Merchants Association did anything for me, and I told him so.
“Ahh, you’ll figure it out,” he said, waving it all away. “So where does all this leave you? How you doin’, really?”
I knew what he was asking me, or I thought I did. “I got a year and nine months clean,” I told him.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad. When you first showed up here, nobody thought you’d last a week.”
“I didn’t, either.”
“Funny, how that works,” he said. “You can never tell. Some people come around looking like they got it knocked, next thing you know you be going to the wake. Some sorry, hopeless excuse for a human being, got nothing left to live for comes through the door, a year later he’s going to school and bitching about how much taxes he has to pay.”
I probably should have felt insulted at that but I knew that Tommy was yanking my chain. Laughing at me, and from him that was okay. “Was I really that bad?”
“Dude. Saul. Nobody comes through that door over there because he has it all together. This place right here? This is the knot in the end of the rope. You know how it is with us: First the men in blue come looking for you, then the men in white, and finally the men in black. You sound to me like you’re still fighting all those same battles. Authority, the Almighty, the Meaning of It All . . .”
“What’s your answer?”
“Mine?” The question seemed to surprise him. “You know what my answer is, man. Don’t pick up, go to my meetings, quit behaving like an asshole.”
“There has to be more to it than that.”
“No, there doesn’t,” he said. “You always did overthink all this shit. You don’t like authority? Guess what, nobody does. That the hill you wanna die on? Fuck, man, you don’t have to fight every single battle that comes along, I tell you what, you sit still for five minutes, somebody crazier than you will come along and do it for you. Nobody says you gotta believe in the Great Cosmic Santa Claus here, you know what I’m saying. Stop wasting time on shit you ain’t gonna figure out anyhow. Accept it: You ain’t gonna think your way out of this. That ain’t your job anyhow. Your job is to worry about how to deal with what’s right in front of you.”
“You make it sound easy, Tommy.”
He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “Simple, never easy. Listen, if you’re in town, I wanna see you. I wanna see you here.”
And that, really, was what I came for. “Thanks, Tommy. I’ll be back.”
The phone rang seven or eight times before he picked it up, I thought he was gonna let it go to voice mail. “What the fuck?” he said, his voice fogged over with sleep. “Who’s calling me in the middle of the freakin’ night?”
“It’s me, Mac.”
“Son of a bitch, Saul . . . Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not that much. Listen, I met Annabel.”
“Unngh.” Sounded like I’d punched him in the gut. “How . . .” Deep sigh. “How’d she look?”
Like a tree in the desert, dying, starved for a lack of water . . . “She’s beautiful, Mac. Little bit of gray in her hair.”
Another deep sigh. “She ask about me?”
“Said you look fine on television.”
He snorted. It was a sound freighted with self-derision.
“She seemed to think it was self-centered of you to assume someone killed Melanie because of something you’ve done. She figured you’d think it was all about you.”
“That ain’t it,” he said. “That ain’t it at all.”
“What is it, then?”
“You oughta know this by now. Some guy chops up his wife and buries her in the backyard, why’s he do it? Why’nt he just divorce her? Why don’t he just throw her the fuck out? Why’s he gotta kill her?”
“You tell me.”
“Saul.” Sounded like a teacher, exasperated by a particularly dim pupil. “He don’t wanna pay child support. He don’t wanna lose his house. And he wants the insurance. It’s the fucking money, it’s always about the money, and Mel didn’t have none. Neither does Annabel, none to speak of.”
“You think that’s it?”
“You mark my words, you get to the bottom of this, it’s gonna be about the green.”
“Okay. Next question, this investigator you hired, you told me, if I remember right, that he was a tall and dried-out prick of an ex-cop. Guy I met was a short, fat prick of an ex-cop.”
“You gotta understand, you can’t do what those guys do for twenty years and come out normal.”
“Whatever. But which was is, tall and dried-out or short and fat?”
“The fat guy runs the agency. What he does, he hooks up with one or two retired detectives from each precinct if he can, that way he’s got guys who know the ground and know the players. They work for him when he’s got something for them to do, the rest of the time they play golf. The tall, skinny guy, who I met maybe twice, he did the actual footwork on Melanie. The fat guy just delivered the bad news.”
“The tall guy, you remember his name?”
He went silent for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “I come up with it, I’ll call you.”
Chapter Four
Melanie Wing’s last address was a tenement building on Thirteenth Street, just off Second Avenue. She had rented a room from someone named Valerie Branch. Branch’s phone number came up in a free online directory, so I called it and asked if I could come by. Branch, sounding somewhat guarded, delayed me until the evening, so I found a hotel room on the West Side, right near the Hudson River. I sat on one of the double beds and looked out the window. You couldn’t see the river from my room, so basically I was staring at buildings and wondering if I’d made a mistake coming south.
It was after six when I found Valerie Branch’s building. Like much of the neighborhood in which it was located, the fortunes of the tenement she lived in appeared to have waxed and waned over the generations. At present it seemed to be in a bit of a lull; the outer doors were beaten and battered, the inner door didn’t lock, and the mailboxes in the hallway were heavily tagged with spray paint, which was the local gang’s way of marking their territories. Better than peeing on the verges, I suppose, but not by a lot. The hallways smelled of cooking. I climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on her door.
A man answered. He was black, a few inches short of six feet, and built like a tree stump. “What can I do for you,” he
said.
“I called and spoke to Valerie Branch,” I told him.
His expression did not change. “What can I do for you.”
Not a happy guy. “My sister lived here once,” I told him. “I wanted to see if Ms. Branch remembered her. If she could tell me anything about what she was like.”
“Your sister.” He stared at me, his eyes cold and unblinking.
“Okay, half sister.”
“Toy?” It was a woman’s voice, and it came from the dim interior of the apartment behind him. “It’s okay, Toy. Let him in.”
Toy? Dump Truck would have fit him better. He stood aside and let me pass.
You can tell a lot about a person by the feel of the place they call home. Ms. Branch was a cultured woman, organized, elegant, and cool. You got that just from her hallway; it smelled faintly like perfume, not sautéed onions like the rest of the building, and a jazz piano tinkled softly somewhere in the background. I liked her before I ever saw her, even if she seemed instinctively to distrust me. “In here, Mr. Fowler,” she said, and I followed the sound of her voice down to the end of the hall and into a small sitting room.
She was in a wheelchair. I guessed her age to be something north of seventy. “Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Branch.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I wanted my son Toy to sit in.”
“Sensible precaution,” I told her. “Though unnecessary in my case. I am a pussycat.”
“You don’t look like a pussycat,” she said. “In fact, you don’t look anything at all like what I pictured.”
And then she did it.
These women, they were beginning to give me a complex. Why did they look at me like that? It was as if I had a big pimple on the end of my nose, or a wart with hair growing out of it, or maybe I had forgotten to zip up my pants. With Branch, the look was there one moment and then the next second it wasn’t; it felt as if someone else had come out of hiding to peer at me through her eyes, just for that heartbeat, smiled that odd quarter smile, and then vanished. The Ms. Branch who was left behind was a bit uncomfortable with me, even with her son standing by, but for that eyeblink of time, in the gaze of that other woman, I felt like the court fool, or maybe the last piece of cake. It was the same vibe I’d gotten from Frank Porter’s mother, and with her, too, it had come and gone in a half second.
And then there was the bank teller, and the woman at Whelen and Ives . . .
I am not in the habit of imagining things. You come up the way I did, you learn early on that your powers of observation are your first line of defense.
But it made no sense. How could it? These women, I was sure, had never met one another, the odds against that were off the charts. File it, I told myself, and keep moving. When something happens that you cannot understand, chances are you do not yet have enough information. Eventually the answer will present itself.
“Melanie was a quiet girl,” Ms. Branch said, once again somewhat distant. “You were hard-pressed to know for sure when she was home. She worked such odd hours, but she was always reading.” She glanced over at Toy, who clearly took that as a shot. Maybe, in his mother’s opinion, he watched too much television. Your mother will never stop comparing you to your betters. “She was a worker. She was one of the invisible women who keep it all going while the men fight over the steering wheel so they can pretend to be in charge.”
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“There was a young man,” she said. “I don’t know how serious they were. I never met him. My agreement with her was clear: no men in my home.”
“Did she tell you his name?”
“Marcus something. Jewish-sounding last name, Hammond or Hayman, something like that. Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”
“No need, Ms. Branch. Did she have people that she hung out with? Regulars, close friends?”
Ms. Branch nodded. “A young woman. Klaudia Livatov. Klaudia with a K. Klaudia was even quieter than Melanie, if that was possible. Klaudia was Melanie’s personal trainer, I think. When she met me she was so afraid that her entire body seemed to tremble. Klaudia was simply another invisible woman, and I think she was probably afraid every time she stepped out her front door. I think she was happiest when no one noticed her. She was quite pretty, but from the way she dressed I would say she’d have preferred to be plainer so that men would not look at her as much.” She gave me a look. “I don’t think a man can ever understand that kind of fear.”
“We all got our demons, Ms. Branch.”
She raised her chin higher and stared at me through her starboard eye. “Not the same thing,” she said. “Not the same thing at all.”
Yeah, maybe not. “Anything else you can tell me about Klaudia Livatov?”
“Very spiritual girl. She wore a cross around her neck, and she had a habit of holding on to it when you tried to talk to her. I could give you her address . . .”
She hesitated. She was afraid, on Klaudia’s behalf. It was nice of her, really. “I’ll be a gentleman, Ms. Branch. You have my word.”
She seemed to consider it. “I’ll have to look it up for you,” she finally said. “I don’t have your powers of recall.” She wheeled herself over to a small table by the window and pulled a drawer open. “There was no one at her memorial service,” she said, without looking at me. I felt indicted nonetheless. “No family, I mean. I know her father was gone, but I did expect to see her mother . . . It was only a few people she worked with, plus Klaudia and I, and some street girls.” She glanced up, her eyes wet. “Prostitutes,” she said. “They cried like babies.”
“How do you suppose she got so friendly with prostitutes?”
“I didn’t get the opportunity to ask her.” She glared at me. “Her mother should have been there.”
“I suppose,” I told her. “Don’t think ill of her. She was afraid, too. She’s caught in a Hatfields and McCoys kind of thing.”
“Crips and Bloods, you mean,” Toy said.
“Something like that. She doesn’t dare to trespass.”
Ms. Branch found the slip of paper with Klaudia Livatov’s information on it, and she read it off to me. “Thanks for all your trouble,” I told her.
Toy showed me out. “Sorry for the distrust,” he told me, out in the hallway. “Landlord’s got rules against subletting, and he’s been trying to get her out of here for twenty years.”
It is generally only drug addicts, alkies, and teenagers who believe that they are immortal. Almost everyone else knows better, they have a visceral understanding that, although Life might be sacred and eternal, lives, specifically yours and mine, are fragile and very easily lost. I had scars to remind me of that, aches and pains that remind me of misjudgments past, and while they have not yet made me a coward, I do tend to be a bit more thoughtful than I once was, particularly when I am about to risk my ass in the pursuit of some new insanity. There were three of them, two on foot and one driving a gypsy cab. I picked them up shortly after leaving Ms. Branch’s building on Thirteenth. My first thought was that I should walk over to Fourteenth and jump on the L train, ride it across town to Union Square and change there for an uptown train. The guy in the car would probably want to stay mobile, the other two ought to be easy enough to lose in the confusion underground, and I could walk away clean.
It was the logical move.
But every man, no matter how soft or genteel he may appear on the outside, carries deep within him the imprint of his reptilian ancestors, and when the beast awakens, logic is generally the first casualty.
The two on foot were still young, young enough to feel immortal.
I walked west on Thirteenth.
You can’t kill the reptile, the reptile will not die because he is part of who you are, he is the reason we are still at one another’s throats, and you can’t really tame him, either; about the best you can hope for is that he stays asleep. I found what I was looking for a couple of blocks west, it was a building even more decrepit that the one Ms. Bran
ch lived in. I stopped on the sidewalk right in front of it. I turned to look back where one of them was coming up the sidewalk behind me; I was probably a bit too theatrical but it was street theater, after all. The second one was on the far side of the street and the cab was laying back. I made eye contact with the one closest to me, he was Asian, with a wisp of beard on his chin. He stopped and pretended to retie his sneaker but it didn’t have any laces, it had those Velcro things instead.
I could feel the reptile taking umbrage at that . . .
How stupid did this kid think I was?
I darted to my right, up the steps and into my chosen building. I heard a yell on the street outside as I pounded up the ancient wooden steps. Out on the street there is a certain amount of risk, no question, but in neighborhoods where the tenements are mostly the same height and stand cheek by jowl, it’s up on the roof where the real shit goes down. I could hear them coming behind me before I was halfway up; I’d cut things a little close, plus they were each ten or twelve years younger than I and maybe fifty or sixty pounds lighter. I could hear two of them, I had to assume the third guy was still in the car, or else he was ditching it and would follow when he could. That gave me my strategy, such as it was. And my luck held, although it wasn’t much of a stretch. If the street-level doors are broken and hanging open, you’ve gotta figure the roof door won’t be much of an obstacle, either.
Or, if you prefer, the goonas were smiling on me . . .
Out on the roofs, it was perfect ambush country. The light was funny, most of the area was lit up by the ambient glow of early evening in the city, light from all the buildings, streetlights, cars, bridges, and all the rest, but there were pools of deep black everywhere due to the usual variety of roof structures like access doors, skylights, and HVAC ductwork. I picked out one of those blacked-out areas and stepped into it.
The first two came charging out of the roof door. The second one was Asian, too. Careless, I thought, both of them. It’s the overconfidence that comes of being too used to prey animals that only flee. A tiger in the wild, for example, will run away from you but not for long, and never in a straight line. Instead, he will circle around behind you so that he can have a look at who you are. That gives him the option of killing and eating you, should he so desire.